


i would, too

by boxerzayn



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: F/M, M/M, Poetry, friends dont exist in my fics???????????????????????????, i dont know what happened with this one really ehmm yeah, lots of crappy convo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-18
Updated: 2013-08-18
Packaged: 2017-12-23 22:39:54
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,705
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/931901
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/boxerzayn/pseuds/boxerzayn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>niall finds zayn maliks journal on the street and he kinda falls in love with zayns poems. then they meet up to hand over the book, and, well</p>
            </blockquote>





	i would, too

**Author's Note:**

> all the poems exept the long one are by derrik c brown the long one is by me mhmmm

“I would love to say that you make me weak in the knees  
but to be quite upfront and completely truthful you  
make my body forget it has knees at all.”

///

niall doesn’t really know what it is that makes him pick up the small leather book. the rain has already soaked him, so he might as well look what it is. he doesn’t check though, until he’s inside his apartment a few minutes later and has peeled of all his dripping wet clothes. “fucking london”  
niall pulls on a pare of dirt-warm sweatpants he’s been wearing for a week now, and throws himself on the sofa. he is exausted, and his hair is drpping on his forehead and he’s cold. the ringing in his ears is louder today than usual, and he can’t decide weather to take a glass of wine or an aspirin. can’t do both, ofcourse.he is cold. wonders when he fell out of rythm like this.  
it takes a couple of minutes of contemplating, but then he gets up, takes a bottle of beer from the fridge, takes the still wet book he found on the street from the cupboard in the hall, and cuddles down under a quilt in the sofa.  
he opens the book, and it smells of rain and london and smoke and cologne and spices. or maybe something else, he doesn’t fucking SMELL for a living. the smoke he’s sure of, though.  
the pages are thick, but worn out, some folded at the corners. they’re clearly handwritten, the words, and makes out that it’s a journal. most of the pages hold only one or two centences, and he feels a bit guilty when he reads through a couple of pages. he sits for quite a long while, mesmerized by the short, beautiful words, until he shifts, shruggs, closes the journal.  
niall takes a sip of his untouched beer. the ringing in his ears are still there, but it’s a bit tuned out from the hum of words in his brain.  
his pale fingers search through the book until he reaches the very first page. there’s a name and a phonenumber; zayn malik 0735139277, and he suddenly feels a wave of guilt rush over him. this was what he picked up the book for, right? to find who’s it was and give it back? he quietly slams together this zayn person’s journa l, or poety book or whatever it is, puts it on the table.  
no, no more reading in that. it’s his. it’s the man’s.

///

the words are too beautiful to stay away from, though, and the next morning while niall is chewing cereal on the sofa (yes, he lives his life on his sofa) he can’t help but open the book again and riffle through a couple of poems. and niall’s not a poetry person, really not, but these are just so easy and soft and at the same time they make him pause after each sentence, to just drag every word in and suck in the feelings behind them.  
-  
“I said to you;  
listen,  
the mathematical equivalent  of a  
woman’s beauty is directly relational    
to the amount that other women hate her.   
and you dear  
are hated  a lot.”  
-  
“Stop ruining love by wanting it so bad.”  
-  
“You are an electric chair disguised as a couch, and I find comfort in you.”  
-  
again he feels guilty for reading theough the pages, some of the stories the short sentences tell are personal and belongs to the man and not him, even though he found the book on the rainy london street. but he wants to saviour the words, read them over and over again, feel them under his fingers. he reads through the journal again.

///

niall is a little bit drunk and the sun is sipping through the curtains in yellow rays, painting the kitchen in stripes. he sighs and picks up the phone, slowly typing in the phone number and making sure he doesn’t press the wrong buttons.  
he shouldn’t do this. but he totally should.  
“hello?” a thick accent says from the other end of the line.  
“hi, is this zayn.. malik?” niall asks and he sounds more confident than he feels. tends to do that alot.  
“um. yes. who am i talking to?”  
“my name is niall” niall explains. “listen, the other day i found this book on the street, and it had your name and number in it, and i. i just wanted to call and say i’d found it, and see if you wanted it back and-“  
“you found my journal?” the man on the other end exclaims. allthough he does sound more like a boy to niall.  
“yeah”  
“i’m so… relieved” zayn says. “thankyou, so much”  
“do you wanna, like, if you wanna have it back..-“  
“can i pick it up somewhere, at your house, or, um-“  
“there’s a café just on my block, it’s called styles coffee, do you know where that is? or i could just-” niall starts, and the bright voice on the other end interrupts him, again.  
“yes, yeah. ‘m there all the time. d’ya wanna have a coffee there or, um, we could just-“  
“coffee sounds great!” niall reasures him, and he doesn’t know why, and in his brain words like fate and soulmates and are buzzing around and, since when is he like this?  
“great. so can you meet up at, like, eleven, on saturday?”  
“yeah, tomorrow?” niall asks, because it is friday, and the boy laughs at the other end. “yeah”.  
(niall thinks he might have fallen a little bit in love. you can’t fall in love with somebody just because of their laugh and poems, or can you?)  
niall laughs too, and it’s a warmer laugh than he has felt in his stomach for many weeks, and this could, to quote fucking high school musical out of all things, be the start of something new.

///

“it’s not that i wait for you   
it’s that   
my arms are doors  
i cannot close”

niall sighs. it’s so brilliant.

///

niall wakes up earlier than usual the next day, feet tangled in his covers and yet they’re cold. he hums as he gets in the shower, naked already.  
the cereal gets stuck in his throat on the way down and he doesn’t really know what’s going on. he hasn’t really been the same since he found the journal. he’s seen the world brighter and it’s so poetic and cheesy that he thinks he might be sick. no.  
no. he isn’t in love with this boy and his soft voice and bubbly laugh, he is maybe a little bit in love with his poems but them he will now have to give back. it’s okay. it was nice for a couple of days.  
he gets to styles coffee a whole quarter too early and that’s weird because he’s always fucking late, but whatever. there’s all these new thigs he’s feeling, brighter colours and words instead of ringing in his ears, he hopes getting to places in time is something that is going to be permanent. all that other girly, summery, happy, lovey stuff he doesn’t really need.  
zayn arrives a couple of minutes too late, and niall has already had a coffee and needs to pee really, but he stays in his chair so he doesn’t miss the boy. man. boy.  
deffinatly boy, he tells himself. zayn is blackhaired, all long eyelashes that curl up and deep brown eyes and pink stubble- surrounded lips. he’s sure it’s zayn, because they’re the only two boys in the whole café, and yeah, he’s more boy than man, and yeah, he’s more beautiful than niall thought.  
niall doesn’t really know what happens then, they say hello, shake hands (zayn has soft skin on his palm), sit down. niall hands over the journal. zayn smiles and he is so beautiful beautiful beautiful that niall feels a little kickass for thinking about fate and love and zayn, before. it all makes sense. he knew zayn was great before he even met him. so he wasn’t just blindes by the beautiful body. or whatever. this is so lousy.  
"thanks for calling and stuff" zayn says. niall watches his lips and the way they moove when he speaks, and he can’t even think about how mesmerizing it must be to hear this boy reading his poems, because on their own those both things (-his lips mooving and the words of his poems-) are so beathtaking. he feels dizzy and it’s so cliché and princessy that niall is pretty sure he is every sort of messed up.  
he snaps in to the conversation again, plays it cool, hmm’s and laughs at just the right places. zayn is so nice.  
“so, did you read any of it?” he asks.  
“the poetry?” niall says, voice breaking in an embarressing way. jeez, he’s not fourteen.  
“so you did.”  
“sorry.”  
“no, it’s okay, it’s fine”. zayn smiles. “did you like something or was it all crap?”  
“yes!” niall exclaims. can’t fucking talk today. “i, um. i liked the one, the..”  
they’re quiet for a couple of seconds, and then niall clears his throat.  
“I would love to say that you make me weak in the knees but to be quite upfront and completely truthful” - he looks at zayn who is now grinning widely- “you make my body forget it has knees at all.”  
zayn nodds, “you like that one?”  
“yeah.” niall confesses. “sorry if that was creepy.”  
“no, no” zayn says, and niall is in love.  
they talk for quite a while, finish their cups of coffee and order two more, and they laugh and talk and zayn reads poems for niall and niall is just as astonished as he thougth he’d be.  
they say goodbye then, “thankyou for finding my book” and “thankyou for letting me read it”  
and then they wave goodbye and zayn is gone and now, standing there on the street, niall has no idea what do to with his life.

///

the weeks pass, niall goes to work down at the supermarket, and he eats fish & chips and tries borrowing a poetry book at the libabry but it’s nothing like zayns journal, and yeah, niall isn’t a poetry person.  
he’s tried to write about zayn. not that he would ever show it, but because he read in the journal that you should write at 3AM when sadness cunsumes you but not controlles you, and so he wrote and wrote and wrote about the way zayns sligt beard wrapped around his face in twists and curls and how if he was a teddybear zayn was a puma and how they couldn’t be together, but maybe, just maybe, because in the jungle book baghera and that bear niall has to google to remember the name of, are best friends. offcourse niall doesn’t only wanna be zayn the pumas best friend, but his lover. maybe they were lovers though, baghera and the bear in the jungle book. it was maybe just disney who couldn’t write that in the film.  
obviously, that poem didn’t quite work out like niall wanted it to, and he scibbled all over it and went to sleep.  
it’s been thee weeks now, since they met, and niall cannot take it any longer. he’s a little drunk, like the last time he had courage enough to call zayn, and zayn picks up after just two rings.  
“hello?”  
“hi.. it’s um. niall. hi”  
“hi” zayn says, niall thinks he hears a smile but, yeah. he doesn’t HEAR for a living.  
“are you seeing someone?” niall blurts out then, and it’s sososososo stupid. who asks that, just like that, on the phone, with someone you’ve only talked to once. what the fuck. besides, he fucking read in the journal about a girl and zayn is so gorgeus and-  
“no,” he lets out a faint laugh. “i don’t really, though, i don’t. um.”  
“like guys?” niall asks, quietly, like he doesn’t really want zayn to hear. or answer.  
“yeah” zayn sighs. like he wants to say anything else.  
“i just wondered if you wanted to take a drink some day, y’know. as- um- as friends.” niall cackles. “that’s why i called. yeah”  
zayn deffenetly smiles now. “you really are something, you”  
niall laughs nervously.  
“but yeah, that sounds nice. we’ll meet at styles at nine?”  
niall nodds, remembers zayn probably doesn’t have his impressive powers of seeing through the telephone, but zayn is saying “alright, see you then” and hanging up, before he has time to squeak out a yes.  
he sighs, tries to calm down his racing heartbeat (how can it still beat when he is this heartbroken?) and mutters just friends just friends just friends just friends until he finds an interesting enough football game on the telly.

///

they meet at nine, walk side by side down the street, past the supermarket (“that’s where i work” “classy”), and to an irish pub niall goes to too often.  
“in here” niall says, and pulls the blackhaired boy in with him.  
they have a couple of drinks, and niall is a bit tipsy from before, and it’s a good thing he’s irish and can handle a bit of alcohol. well almost.  
“come home with me”  
“i don’t know if i should.”  
“i wrote a poem for you.”  
“okay.”

///

niall breathes out nervously. “umm.”  
“come on, i wanna hear it” zayn says, and strokes nialls cheek.  
the touch sends an embarresing amount of blood to his face, but he clears his throat, and then begins.  
“it’s funny;  
i see a hundred stubbles every day  
passning by in the hurry of the supermarket  
and no stubble twists and turns like yours  
i think it’s because it get’s all shrinkly and soft under your touch.  
i would,  
if i was to touch you cheeks all the time.”  
zayn is smiling again. and (can you believe it?!), blushing. niall breathes out and continues.  
“it’s funny.  
i read thousands of words every day,  
but none stick and tune out the the ringing in my ears like yours did.  
i think the words get sweaty an sticky just thinking about have having been in your mouth.  
i know i’d be, if i had. been there, umm”  
he looks up from the paper, expects a laugh or atleast an awkwards silence, but zayn kisses him then. right on the mouth, full on, cherises nialls mouth like if the words that has just rolled of his tongue were actually beautiful.  
they kiss and kiss and kiss, and niall knows now, that his heart was never broken, when zayn said those words on the phone. that’s why it can beat so fast. he breaks away from the kiss, suddenly feeling like he’s drowning, without zayns lips as his air. “why’d you lie about being gay?” he breathes against zayns mouth. “why’d you?”  
“because you turned me down”  
“i didn’t” zayn breathes, kisses him again. “it was because. just.” he looks up at him. “you’re too sweet, niall. you’re like coffee with milk and sugar. i drink mine black”  
niall pushes him down on the sofa then, as to prove him wrong, hovers over his thin, long body, before re-attaching their lips and letting his hand wander down zayns chest and stomach.

///

niall wakes up, tangled in unneccesary sheets and hairy boylegs (just the legs, looks more manish than boyish on zayn) and with sticky skin ripping apart.  
he slowly gets out of bed, gets in the shower, washes of the smell of sweat and sex and smoke and zayns colgone.  
he wanks off under the pouring water to the though of how zayn felt last night, and he comes so hard he almost blacks out.  
when he’s done in the shower, zayn is still asleep on his bed, and niall doesn’t bother waking him up. he walks out in the kitchen, wishes he’d invested in a pair of slippers, makes two cups of coffee, one black and one with too much sugar and milk.  
he gulps down the black cup and hurrys out of the door, wants to be at work when zayn wakes up to his milky sugary cup of coffee instead of his niall.


End file.
